It was just noise when it started — Donald Trump spouting wild, unsubstantiated claims about election fraud, his lawyer seething at an almost comical press conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping business. But one week after an election in which Joe Biden received close to 5 million more popular votes than Trump and captured more than 270 electoral votes, the president and top Republican Party officials are nowhere near conceding. And with his posturing — and statements of Cabinet officials like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — Trump is fueling a bonfire that’s consuming the GOP and disrupting the traditional transfer of power. It will be nearly impossible for Republicans to alter the outcome or prevent Biden from taking office. Counting all the states where he currently leads in voting, Biden has 306 electoral votes. In Michigan, Biden’s lead at the moment is more than 10 times larger than Trump’s winning margin was there in 2016. To date, Trump’s campaign has yet to produce evidence in any state of the kind of widespread ballot fraud the president alleges. Yet one week after the election, there is no sign any of that is sinking in. Instead, the controversy seems to be metastasizing within GOP circles, as the party unites behind an idea that threatens to distract Washington and state capitals for weeks amid an ongoing pandemic and a looming transition of government.
National: Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud | David E. Sanger, Matt Stevens and Nicole Perlroth/The New York Times
Hours after President Trump repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday declaring flatly that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised. The rebuke, in a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, never mentioned Mr. Trump by name. But it amounted to a remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Mr. Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed. The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process. Coming directly from one of Mr. Trump’s own cabinet agencies, it further isolated the president in his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election. The statement also came as a previously unified Republican Party showed signs of cracking on the question of whether to keep backing the president. Across the country, election officials have said the vote came off smoothly, with no reports of systemic fraud in any state, no sign of foreign interference in the voting infrastructure and no hardware or software failures beyond the episodic glitches that happen in any election. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lead in the popular vote has expanded to more than five million, and he remains on track to win a solid victory in the Electoral College.
Full Article: Election Officials Directly Contradict Trump on Voting System Fraud – The New York Times
